what's up my friends so I got a comment recently about how panels
work how electrical panels actually work there's like the two bars inside right and
there's Breakers that hook up and like how does it all work let's get into it
now to start out let's talk about the components of an electrical panel there's a few things that
you need to know first thing we've got the incoming terminals for each one of the phases
and if it's a single phase panel you're gonna have one on one side that's probably going to
be a black wire one on the other side that's going to be a red wire these are where your
incoming ungrounded conductors or hot conductors go next you're gonna have a neutral terminal and
the neutral terminal connects down to a neutral bus where all of the neutrals get landed a lot
of times you'll see two neutral bus bars one on each side and there's like a bar behind that kind
of leads all of them together and connects both sides but sometimes you're only going to see one
neutral on one side and then you'll see like the ground on the other side so both of those
bus bars might look the same but one of them is neutral and one of them is grown that brings me
to the next component The Ground Terminal and the ground bus bar what you'll notice with a ground
bar though is that it's attached to the panel it's literally like physically touching the the metal
of the electrical panel but the neutral is always isolated with some kind of plastic and there's a
reason for that we'll get into that I've got other videos that we can look into about why we Bond but
for now this is just the basic components now the the actual guts of the panel or the panel board
are completely removable you can take a screw out and pull the entire panel board out so that all
that's left is just a metal can and if you ever have you know a damaged panel board you can take
one out go get a new panel board put a new panel board in its place another thing to think about
is whether or not you need a main breaker a main breaker is a switch essentially that shuts off
the entire panel board it shuts off all of the bus bars so there's no power to them some situations
that you get into if you're in a sub panel somewhere in a garage and you know you already
have a main or you have a breaker ahead of it you may not need a main breaker in the panel you might
just get a main lug panel so main lug is literally just lugs up on the top that feed the panel main
breaker is where you have a main breaker inside of the panel a lot of main lug panels you can
actually add a main breaker kit to them to make a main lug panel into a main breaker panel
and the last thing to talk about really is the bus bars so inside of the panel board you see
all of these little fingers they're kind of alternating depending on if you're you know
single phase or three phase the left terminal on the panel at the top where you bring like your
black wire in is going to come down and connect to every other one of these fingers of this bus bar
and then on the right side you're going to have your red wire coming in and the red has its own
bus bar and it's going to go every other as well so basically every breaker as you go down a panel
every breaker is alternating which phase that it's on every breaker that's across from each
other is on the same phase so let's just say we have a main breaker that is 200 amps and then
down here we have a whole bunch of Breakers right there's going to be all these individual Breakers
probably some over here too so let's say we've got a hot lug a hot lug we'll say that we have a
ground lug and we have a neutral lug our incoming hot is going to be L1 and then we're going to have
another incoming hot that's L2 we're also going to have a neutral and we're going to have a ground
we'll do a g and a neutral so these are the incoming wires that are feeding the panel right
so on this bus bar the bus bar is going to go down and you're going to land all your wires on
that this bus bar is going to go down you're going to land all your neutrals on that all your grounds
on that now there's these fingers that go down the back or these pieces of metal that we call
bus bars so a bus bar what it does is it actually connects this terminal it goes down and it hits
two Breakers that are crossed from each other so every breaker every panel that you see where
there's Breakers across from each other are using the same hot then it skips a breaker
and goes across and it keeps doing that it keeps skipping a breaker if this is a single phase panel
then on the red side same thing comes down here skips the first one goes to the second
so the bus bars inside of there are actually aligned like that so two Breakers across from each
other are going to be on the same phase L1 and L2 are two different phases it's a single phase
system but it's two different sides of that same phase so we just say which phase are you on we're
on red phase or black phase or what people will say is like they've got a phase and they've got
B phase now when you hook a breaker into one of these say that we've got this breaker right here
hooked up this is going to be on red face we've got a wire we use red wire go out to the field
to like some kind of load somewhere we'll say a light bulb
the bottom side of that bulb is going to be your hot so it's going to run hit the bottom of the
bulb it's going to go through the neutral which is the side this shell is the neutral
and it's going to go all the way over to the neutral bus
now that makes a connection with this one so now we have a complete circuit right we see the red
bus on this side of the breaker is actually where the red is touching it's going through the breaker
and going out to the wire so power is able to come in go out to a load through the bottom of a light
bulb or it could be a vacuum cleaner through a plug it could be a whole bunch of different
things in this case it's going through the bottom of our load it's going up through this lighting
element going back down through and hitting the neutral and it's completing that circuit all
the way down and it's going back and forth back and forth alternating current 60 times a second
these out here like you can't see them but they're actually when you go out to a Transformer
the Transformer up on the pole where these wires go to show there's a there's a big old
coil in here that we call our secondary there's another one called a primary
that doesn't touch and that goes that's what the utility lines are that go out on
the poles but it's a completed piece of wire it's basically just a single piece of wire
so our red comes over and hooks up to this one this guy going out hooks up to this one
our black hooks up to this one so now we've got both of our wires we've got a 220 240 volt circuit
between these two 240 volts and then our neutral connects to the middle
point of all of that so right here in the middle somewhere they tap a neutral
so we're able to get 240 between the two Hots or we're able to get 120 between each one of the huts
so that from here you see right like we came down we went through complete unbroken nowhere is this
wire broken goes all the way through the neutral comes all the way back through and goes all the
way back down to the load so it's a complete circuit the entire way now what about three phase
three phase works the exact same way but in a lot of commercial environments you're going to have
three phase instead of single phase so we've still got a black that goes to one of our terminals
one of our uh phases and a red and you'll have a blue most likely that's most common wiring colors
here we'll have we'll put neutral on this side here we'll put ground on the other side
so same thing all of your incoming Hots they're going to Transformers but up on the pole you're
going to have three Transformers that are wired together in a specific way some of them could be
wired in series some could be wired in parallel which means you're going to either get 240 volts
out of the three-phase situation or you're going to get 208 out of the situation one might have a
neutral with the 208 one might not have a neutral with the 240 just kind of depends
if it's 480 and 277 instead of 240 and 120 same thing there's three cans up on a pole or there's
some big three-phase Transformer sitting on a pad somewhere but you still have the complete loops
at the other end and the the layout of the phases is just like this
every phase is alternated so every three every three Breakers are black red blue and
then you go three more Breakers black red blue black red blue black red blue all the way down
so same exact situation with loads uh three phase loads are a little bit more complex to to explain
and I've done some videos on those we've got some courses on electrician you that actually cover
like single phase power three-phase power what all of that is so check out electricianu.com there's a
link in the description below join our membership and we have all kinds of red like premium videos
and courses and classes we even have continuing education all kinds of stuff if you just want
to nerd out like me I like to nerd out about electrical stuff uh go check out electrician
you alright so I hope that answers some of y'all's questions I've done some other videos where I've
shown inside of Breakers click here if you'd like to see that video if you're curious how like the
insides of Breakers work how they trip and all of the different trip settings and everything
like that click this video right here I love you crazy people I'll see you in the next one